Managing Your Site

Managing Your Site

There are a number of tasks that you’ll need to perform for your WordPress site, especially if you self-host, either one time or regularly. Here’s a summary of some common things you’ll need to know about and do:

Monitoring Your Site

How do you know if your blog is running? There are a few approaches. WordPress’ own Jetpack plugin offers a regular ping service with email notifications. If you’d like to add smartphone notifications and additional controls, try my Simple Monitor App. A slightly more expensive service is Scout.

Migrating Your WordPress Site

Migrating WordPress remains one of the more frustrating and difficult tasks of a publisher. There are a number of ways to accomplish site migration, but I’ll describe a few here. Also, the more content and media you have on your site, the longer the process will likely take.

When you move a WordPress site, you need to be concerned about several things: 1) the WordPress database, 2) WordPress themes, plugins, media and image files and 3) possible changes to the site URL address. The process is described in detail in the WordPress codex. Here’s a very good tutorial of the process that you need to undertake to move your site.

WordPress has a built in Export tool and there is also an Import plugin. This can be helpful for migrating content but doesn’t address full site moves, migrating media files, et al.

Managing Backups

The WordPress codex describes the backup process at a high level. If you’re using a managed host, you should check whether or not they provide backup services for you. They should. However, it’s still best practice to have an alternative site backup.

If you’re self-hosting WordPress, you’ll need to regularly backup the WordPress MySQL database as well as the file system with the themes, plugins and media files. You may also want to backup your Apache site configuration files. If you’re running your site in the AWS cloud, you can manually build a snapshot of your entire volume. You can also customize a script to schedule snapshots using the AWS API or use a service such as Skeddly.

Database Cleaning

The longer you publish, the more database content you’ll accumulate. It can be useful to cleanup your database from time to time to improve site performance. You can use the WP Optimize plugin to accomplish this.

Checking for Broken Links and Unused Images

As your site ages, links around the web will break, some will disappear – leaving your readers in the lurch and possible lowering your search engine rankings. The Broken Link Checker plugin can help you identify and resolve these issues.

Also, as you edit posts, you’ll leave media files on the site that you don’t need anymore. This will slow down your backups. The Delete Unused Images plugin may assist with this.